by Alex White
She waved Orna over. “The time is now! Charger, get in there!”
“Don’t have to tell me twice,” said Orna, claws clanking into fists as the battle armor sprinted into combat.
“Coming to you, Doc!” said Boots, flying across the arena with the falconer’s mark.
“I’m ready,” was Malik’s reply as she took him by the shoulder.
“Good. Let’s keep your guts inside you this time.”
They came in hot behind Witts, just a stone’s throw away, and Malik began tracing out his spell. Witts spotted them, but it was too late—Malik’s ball of purple sleep magic flowed into him, seeping into his limbs and dragging him low. Aisha fired once again, and he raised both of his hands to block his face. Nilah sunk her fist directly into his gut, drawing forth a river of blood.
And Boots copied his engine the whole time, free of interference.
She had a knack for it, but the Wellspring helped her fill in the holes: the inveigler’s mark to coax, a merchant’s mark for exchange, and dozens more. She spun them across the wide-open space until they spread like sparkling raindrops on the floral glass. Then she multiplied and folded them, strengthening each strand of magic.
“Witts!” Boots bellowed as her engine completed. A dozen silvered hooks slashed out from the glyphs, latching onto the skin just above the collarbone—where he’d absorbed the shard from the Vogelstrand.
He stopped moving, frozen in shock. His ruined face twitched as he spluttered blood from wet lips. The hooks pulled, splitting his skin open to reveal the base of a cut crystal. Tendrils of shadow crept into the open wound, slithering around the crystal and yanking.
Like a rotten tooth, the Vogelstrand’s shard came free with a stream of viscera. The old man went down clutching the hole in his lower neck, eyes wide with anger. He raised shaking fingers and traced out the most pathetic usurer’s mark she’d ever seen. Skin blackened and peeled up around his knuckles as he used his own life energy to repair leaking arteries. His hand became a useless stump, then his arm, and that fact brought a tiny satisfaction to Boots.
She snapped her fingers, and Inkwitch’s throbbing rock beat stopped dead.
“Bring me in,” Witts said. “I can talk to your people. Tell them everything. I still have so many… so many dreams I’ve set in motion.”
Cordell and Malik gathered at Boots’s back, standing tall over their nemesis. Charger joined them, along with Aisha.
Nilah stood by Witts’s side, expression somber. She plucked the Vogelstrand shard from the air and stepped back.
“We can’t arrest him,” said Cordell. “Not after what he’s done.”
“I only have one life to take.” Witts spoke through his own blood. “But I can give back so many more. Bring me in.”
Alister and Jeannie lay still on the ground, breathing shallow. They deserved to see what was coming, too, and so Boots unraveled the magic that kept them in stasis. Both twins gasped as Boots shielded their minds from the effects of the temple. They looked haunted. How much did they remember?
Boots beckoned them to her side, and they limped in her direction, clearly drained by the ordeal.
“You’re set on killing me now, then?” asked Witts, his skin even more sallow than before. “You don’t care to dismantle the plans I’ve put in place?”
Boots stared down at the bleeding man like a scab had started talking. “I learned a new trick recently. Want to see?”
She yanked him to her and cast two marks, reader and torturer, and rifled his memories with excruciating speed. “Sure. You have other schemes, but this was your last hurrah. I see that now.”
Recognition dawned on Witts’s stricken face, and Boots knew that look well. They’d executed a lot of traitors in the Famine War, and the whole air base would turn out to watch. When a soldier saw that fatal wall, pockmarked with slinger fire, they knew there would be no running, no rescue, no clemency.
The old ones like Witts would always smile.
“Then it’s over,” he wheezed. “The dream of life… beyond time.”
Boots spat down onto his face, and he flinched. “Proud to kill it.”
Together, the eight of them would bear witness to the end of the perpetrator of intergalactic madness. Boots suddenly remembered the backpack she’d been wearing—Kin had been inside, smashed to sand by the crush of the Wellspring.
She held out her hand and called forth the tracker’s mark, locating a single grain of glass from Kinnard’s data cube. She called it to herself, then cast the mending mark upon the minute pebble. Pieces from all over the arena reassembled in her palm until Kin’s crystalline form once more graced her sight.
“Almost everyone is here,” she said, thinking of Armin, Didier, and everyone else who’d been killed in the Famine War.
Witts nodded, fixing Boots with a sympathetic expression. “I want you to know, I’m sorry that your losses were for nothing. I’m sorry I wasn’t the man to save life itself. I’m a failure, and you paid my price.”
She held up the cube. “This is Kinnard. He was my friend during the war you caused. He died because of you, just like my mom, my dad, and my brother. You took away our homes, you arrogant…”
Don’t let him have your anguish, too.
“Anyway,” Boots said, looking into Kinnard’s forest of facets. “I just thought you two should meet.”
She reared back and brought the corner of the heavy cube into Witts’s forehead once, then twice more. His eyes rolled back in their sockets, and she wiped Kin off on her shirt as he slumped lifelessly to the ground.
She passed the cube back to Charger, who took it. “Sorry about breaking Kin’s speaker. Put him somewhere safe for me?”
They stared at Witts in silence as his breath rattled away, unwilling to make a joke.
“What should I do with this?” asked Nilah, holding up Witts’s dripping shard from the Vogelstrand.
Boots focused everything she had into a conductor’s mark and squeezed. The iridescent surface lit up from within, releasing a whine of increasing pitch.
“That crystal is now unstable,” said the Wellspring, “and will explode with a yield of fifty megatons. Advise you get rid of it.”
Boots summoned a porter’s mark and teleported it straight up into Bastion’s guts.
“Target destroyed. Severe damage to the Graveyard dome,” said the Wellspring. “Elizabeth, there are now more than one thousand ships engaged in combat action in orbit, with the bulk of fighting taking place directly above us. Several ships have commenced orbital bombardment.”
“They’re going to make sure Witts is dead.” Boots looked down at her remaining original hand, light bleeding through her arteries to give her a red glow. One hand metal, the other monstrous. “Wellspring, how long can you withstand the assault?”
“This facility is possibly the most advanced in the galaxy, so another seven minutes, at least.”
“It’s time to go,” said Boots, turning to regard her friends as she cast the tracker’s mark. With the unrivaled power of the Wellspring at her back, she could locate anyone in the galaxy, and she had just the target in mind. “Somewhere safe, where you’ll be protected.”
“‘You’ll,’” Nilah repeated, an edge of suspicion in her voice. “Why not ‘we’?”
Murmurs went up among the others as they all began to grasp her words.
Boots shrugged. “Teleportation allergy, remember? If I try, and it doesn’t work…”
“The hell you will, Bootsie,” said Cordell, striding toward her, and she laid a palm against his chest with a smile. He looked up at her, betrayed.
“Don’t worry, Captain. I’ll make sure none of this survives. Been an honor.”
She teleported him to Checo’s hidden compound in Harvest. Before the others could react, she was on them with the porter’s mark, popping each one across light-years, to arrive in the most comfortable room she could think of. Malik and Aisha were taken by surprise. The twins did nothing to stop her. Orna
took two tries, but Boots got her on the second go-round.
Only Nilah was quick enough to dodge, and dodge she did, screaming, “Wait! Wait!”
“Damn it, kid! I’m trying to give you a heroic send-off and you’re ruining it!”
“Good!” she shouted back. “You have to stop!”
Boots ran out of steam, not physically, but emotionally, and let her hands drop to her side in frustration. “What do you want me to do, huh? I’m not going to go out there and fight all those people! Most of them are innocent starfarers.”
Nilah threw her arms wide. “Well, have you tried not bloody sacrificing yourself? Look, I know things are tragic, but you’re not even questioning your fate!”
“Maybe this is how I want to be remembered! Doing a good thing. You’ve got Orna!”
“And you’ve got all of us!” said Nilah. “You’re holding the ultimate power in the universe! Think!”
Wellspring, is it even possible for me to teleport from here?
“Yes,” came the reply. “Though your genetic anomalies make you a dimensional anchor, it’s possible to pry you loose. However, the cost will be too great, so I have not suggested it.”
What’s the cost?
“A burst of power, enough to ignite a star. Such an immense expenditure would fully drain my reserves, and I would crumble to dust. Given that you have traveled great distances to acquire me—”
“So I’d destroy the Wellspring, and get out?” Boots clapped her hands together with a bright smile. “Well, that’s egg on my face. You ready to go?”
When Boots arrived in Checo’s warm surgical den with Nilah, her friends rushed her, hugging her tightly and cursing her every way they could. She recognized the place where they’d all had their faces changed many months ago and sighed with relief.
“Warning: Discharge protocol engaged,” came the crystal AI’s voice. “Wellspring shutting down in three…”
There came a lurch of pain from her back. Her stomach followed shortly, then the rest of her. Glowing globules of sweat beaded up on her skin, twisting inside with rainbow flecks of the Wellspring. It poured from her in incandescent strands, and for a terrifying minute, Boots wondered if she’d only showed up to buy the farm in Checo’s compound.
She stumbled to the floor, shaking and ragged, the white lights disappearing from behind her eyes. A numbness overtook her as magic fled from her system, the colors of her world growing a little dimmer. The floor smoked and pitted as crystal drops touched it—as did her mechanical arm, clothes, and anything else that she wasn’t born with.
Checo whipped open the door in the form of a well-muscled young man, arms rippling as they leveled a slinger rifle at the lot of them. Recognition filled their eyes, and they gave the most casual, “Oh. Hello,” possible under the circumstances.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Rally Point
Boots needed to stop waking up in infirmaries; it was getting to be a habit.
Unlike an infirmary, it smelled like spatchcock ale-roasted chicken and fingerling potatoes. When she opened her eyes, she found soft red draperies upon every wall and plush carpets lining the floor—and she was slightly disappointed not to find that chicken nearby.
“Ah. The hotelier’s mark,” she grunted.
Someone had taken her clothes, replacing them with a silky robe. The air that wafted out of the neckline carried a new smell—body odor and medical adhesive. Luxurious, bulky cushions shifted underneath her, and she struggled to get upright. Boots tried putting her left hand down to push herself up, but instead found nothing—then rolled off the pile with a curse.
When she sat upright, she found the cause of her clumsiness: her arm had gotten all jammed up by copious magic grit from the Wellspring, and most of the joints were fused. She’d seen enough seized engines to know the thing was toast. She could almost make her hand grip if she forced it, and the fingers made one last grinding noise before freezing up.
The loss of her original arm at Mother’s hands had been gutting. She blew up her second arm in a glorious assault on Izak Vraba, and now she’d need yet another prosthesis. At some point, she had to laugh.
That’s what she told herself as she tried to stifle her tears.
After losing her leg, Nilah had obtained a fancy new magical one with perfect tactile acuity and haptics. Boots would have no such luck. She’d scoured the galaxy for her battle-scarred prosthetic, and at best, it buzzed her nerves when she was touching something. Her metal arm couldn’t tell the difference between the smoothness of marble and supple skin, couldn’t feel something as fine as a hair, and scarcely transmitted the temperature.
“Think about what you bought with that arm, Miss Elsworth.”
Boots turned to find a lithe Checo DosSantos, resplendent and androgynous in a low-cut black blouse. Their cheekbones swept back above a small, downturned mouth, giving their eyes the same knowing look as a great cat, as they traipsed into the womblike room. Their hair waved with alternating patterns of silver and cyan, creating the appearance of a waterfall in the breeze.
“Checo,” said Boots.
“You’re getting better at recognizing me.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Am I, though? Or are you just unreasonably more attractive than everyone else on the crew?”
An eyebrow quirked. “I could be a spy, sent to lull you into a false sense of security. Pump you for information.”
“So what if you are?” asked Boots. “I did what I was born to do, and no government in the universe can take that away. It only cost me an arm… and an arm… and one more arm.”
“Maybe I could give you a hand with that.”
“I did not slay a god to deal with these puns.”
Checo looked impressed. “So Henrick Witts is really dead, then?”
“He’ll darken the galaxy no more.”
Checo sat down beside her on the bed, eyes sympathetic. Despite the contractor’s young appearance, their face held the wisdom of ages, and Boots wondered how old they might be. Checo took Boots’s metal hand and stroked the plates; the gesture was somewhat lost through the cold, unfeeling, jammed-up limb.
“Would you like some free advice from a former Fixer?”
Boots snorted. “You do things for free now? The universe really has changed.”
“I’ve killed a lot of people—some for good causes and some who were only trying to see justice done against my clients. I’ve cheated death more times than I’ve cared to consider, but I lost things, too… friends, treasures, plenty of lovers…”
Boots regarded Checo’s eyes, watching them alternate through the colors of the rainbow every time the angle of light changed. They spoke earnestly and kindly, and if Boots didn’t know any better, she’d have thought the ex-Fixer actually cared what happened to her.
Checo reached up and lightly tapped Boots’s worthless limb. “Celebrate the losses, my dear. Every time you start to feel angry about the arm, just remember the face Henrick Witts made when he died.”
“I caved his face in.”
“Immediately before that, then,” Checo corrected.
“Oh, it was sweet,” said Boots, “but now I’m mad at every last loser in the galaxy who didn’t lift a finger to help. Every one of those punks who sat on the sidelines but knew what was wrong… they all deserve to swing. The traitors, yeah, but the bankers and mercs who fought for his side—am I ever going to stop wanting to pull their guts out through their mouths?”
“No,” said Checo. “There will always be someone out there for you to kill.”
“Maybe you’re wrong, friendo.” Boots forced a smirk. “I’m retiring, starting today. I’ve got a major fortune in partially untraceable cash and a fantastic plot of land on Hopper’s—”
“Boots.” Checo stopped her with a touch. “You’re wanted now, and you’d better act like it.”
“What? Again? For what?”
“Not officially, you see,” said Checo, “but my little ears are catching whispers. Ta
itu controls Origin. The other GATO constituents are furious. They want to know what happened out there, and…”
“And we know everything, which means there are spooks everywhere looking for us. I get it.”
“The Taitutians—and everyone else—has business with you, and once they have their answers, it’s hard to imagine keeping liabilities alive.” Checo shook their head. “I do hate to be the bearer of bad news.”
“Getting used to it. Just tell me something good.”
“I had one of my people rob your prosthetic designer’s office for the plans. We’ll have you armed up in no time.”
She gave them a wry grin. “What did I tell you about puns? Where are the others? Are they okay?”
“They’re resting. Most of them are sedated. Your people came in with a lot of injuries.” Checo looked at her expectantly. “You know, you deserve a break, too. Miss Brio has already paid a handsome amount for your safety, and I can promise you, she and her wife have been enjoying my pharmaceutical diversions.”
“Uh-huh. Hey, no offense, but I’m not sure how to trust you to drug me. Why wouldn’t you just hand us over?”
“Because your friends appear to be an endless trough of money for me, and the last thing I want to do is destroy my favorite revenue stream. You know that I have more than a full share of the Harrow when I add up all of the purchases from your people?” Checo rose, sweeping aside one of the curtains to reveal rows upon rows of crystal vials, each filled with a clear liquid. Gold filigree lettering announced the contents: peace, confidence, love, and a hundred others. “I’m not saying you must indulge, but do you have somewhere to be?”
Checo dialed up projections of the others in blissful slumber, their mouths curled into serene smiles. Boots spotted Cordell in the mix and looked away. It somehow wasn’t right for her to see her captain asleep.
